Mailing mics to podcast guests

I host and produce a weekly tech podcast called CodeNewbie. It’s an interview based show, roughly an hour long. All the interviews are done remotely.

Editing shitty audio is a pain if you care about quality. As the host, you have 100% control over your own environment, but when it comes to your guest, you cross your fingers and hope it works out. Sometimes everything is great and the editing process doesn’t take much. Other times, you hear cracks and pops and peculiar noises in the background that distract from the awesome things the guest is saying, and it breaks your heart. Or at least annoys you.

The Problems With Our Not-so-great Solutions

We’ve tried a few things to improve our guest’s audio quality. We require guests to use headphones. We ask that they use a USB mic, but usually that’s not an option, so we ask them to use the mic on their headphones at the very least.

But because the headphone mic is dangling from your body, it’s easy to hit the mic when you move as you talk, and we find it often hit the guest’s shirt. This can get really painful if the guest is wearing jewelry and the mic hits metal. We tell the guest to rest their arm on a table and hold the mic away from their body while they talk, and this has worked surprisingly well. There are fewer unwanted noises.

But unless the room you’re in is super quiet, the mic pics up a lot of crap, and it takes work to get those sounds down to a tolerable minimum in post production.

So we gave up on this idea and started shipping mics to guests. It’s worked out surprisingly well.

Solution: Buy and Ship Mics

The solution we came up with involves three pieces: equipment, shipping, tracking of equipment.

Equipment
We bought 5 mics at about $50 each. We got the Samson Q2U Recording Pack, which comes with a stand and big headphones. To make shipping easier, we don’t send the big headphones. We also bought windscreens for each mic (5-pack is $7).

I know other podcasters who ship out headsets, which are a bit cheaper ($30). I’m personally not a fan of the audio quality of these headsets. This is highly personal and subjective, but the three issues I’ve had with these mics are:

1. The quality has always sounded too tinny to me.
2. Because the mic is so close to your mouth, it’s hard to avoid hearing heavy breathing and plosives (the noise that happens when you pronounce certain letters like “p” and “b”), which can be really distracting to your listeners and give you more post production work.
3. Because the mic is so easy to adjust, even when you’ve positioned it to avoid problem #2, there’s a high chance the guest will reflexively adjust the mic mid-interview, giving you unwanted noise and changing the way they sound entirely. There’s a chance your listeners may not notice the difference, but it always seems pretty obvious to me.

But don’t take my word for it. Try out a few mic options and see how they sound to you!

Shipping
The equipment fits in a padded flat rate envelope (12 1/2" x 9 1/2"), which costs about $13 to send and return. We bought them in bulk online from USPS. We put the equipment (mic, windscreen, USB cord, mic stand) in the envelope along with a return envelope that’s already paid for and addressed. I also include a few CodeNewbie stickers and a handwritten thank you with instructions on what to do the day of the interview and how to ship it back.

I’ve been very surprised at how well the shipping has worked. We test all the mics when we get them back to make sure there are no issues. The only problem we’ve had is when one guest left the usb cord plugged into the mic, and the tip of the usb got bent. It still worked, but now I tell the guests to unplug everything before putting it in the envelope and shipping back.

All my interviews are done remotely, and we’ve had a number of international guests. Unfortunately, international shipping is too expensive, so I cross my fingers and hope the international guest has access to a good mic.

Tracking
I keep a spreadsheet that helps me track the status of each mic. Each mic set has its own ID, and each piece of equipment (mic, mic stand, cord) is labeled with the ID.

Every time I ship a mic set, I create a new row in the spreadsheet and record the mic ID, guest name, status (IN or OUT), shipped out date, checked in date (when it gets back to me), shipping city, and tested (once I get the mic set back, I test the mic to make sure it still works and put an “x” here if everything checks out).

Lessons Learned and Other Shit

Turn the mic on
It’s easy to forget to turn the mic on. When you plug the mic into your computer, a little green light turns on, so it looks like the mic is on. But there’s an actual ON/OFF button that can be hidden once you put the mic on the stand. This made me panic once, thinking I’d shipped a broken mic, but it just wasn’t turned on yet. I’ve learned to remind guests to turn it on before recording. This is specific to the mic we chose, so make sure to check how yours works!

Tell guests to put the mic on the stand
This might seem obvious, but a lot of podcast guests are super nervous, or they received the mic package the day before the interview and they simply forgot about the mic stand. The stand is crucial. DO NOT LET GUESTS HOLD THE MIC. It is very unsteady, and you end up with very distracting, subtle noises that comes from the slight wobble of someone’s hand, and you’ll hate yourself afterwards for not making sure they used the stand.

Tell the guest how to sit
For the mic we use, we tell guests to spread their hand and position themselves a spread-hands-length away from the mic. It’s far enough away that it won’t pick up much breathing and mouth noise, but close enough that the noise isn’t so bad and won’t require a ton of processing in post production. But you should definitely test out the mic beforehand and determine the distance you’d prefer.

This is still a relatively new process (we’ve shipped out mics for about 6 episodes now), so I’m sure we’ll learn more as we go along. In the meantime, if you have any questions on how we do stuff or want to share how you’ve solved a similar problem, leave a comment below!

You can checkout the CodeNewbie Podcast here and follow @CodeNewbies on twitter here.